My afternoon

I love this landscape.

Acoustics

I have decided that I have an opinion about acoustics that for some reason wasn't there before. And that is a live acoustic with small, not too loud percussive sounds is more stimulating than the kind of quiet you get in some places where there's carpet everywhere and a kind of hush that eats all your thought processes. The kind of place where if you had chapped hands and you rubbed your fingers together you could hear that sandpaper sound. I would become more than stupid in that environment, I think I'd feel like taking a nap.

Plaster walls sound different than ones with sheet rock. A room has timbre.

I have a room in my house where the carpet got taken out and it feels clean now. Partly because of what it sounds like. Rooms with a dead acoustic don't feel tidy. They have the sound of stuff which which absorbs the energy in a room.

Next time you're in a space, listen to the room.

St. Olaf Reunion

So there are only two people in this picture from my 25th reunion I don't know.  What wonderful people.  Rob, Nancy, Kelly, Mary, Vaughn, Lisa.  You're great and it was so good to see you all.

Intuition

So I get back from vacation and at first I pretend to work and then eventually start to do actual work and I got that funny feeling that the problems I've been asked to solve aren't actually the real problems.  Vacation does that to you. See by the time they get to me they've been "talked about" and a funny thing happens when a group passes a thought back and forth in a room:  it gets uniform.  Business problems become communication problems because well, those business problems are just too big to grapple with and here's my favorite:  "the client isn't asking for that they're asking for this".  So I says to the group, "yes, but" and the exhale and tell me they need to get to work which is what I was trying to do with them.  

So much of what we do is often not what we ought to be doing.   Which blurs the line between real work and pretend work.